Now that I’ve been able to meet my mentor I understand more about the scope of my project and about aerosols in general. Having no background in atmospheric chemistry there was quite a lot of background research I had to do to develop my elevator speech. I think I did a good job in the end despite being very apprehensive!
I’ve been enjoying working with/alongside the other researchers in my office – three other grad students and an undergrad student. On Friday I got my computer set up for Igor and went through the lengthy tutorial and I was ready to get down to some data analysis on Monday but I realized almost immediately that I needed to learn a lot more about coding in order to do that. My data was previously collected from another project and so far I have 6 months worth of data in 6 different categories taken every second – so millions of data points. And I need more. I also just started learning how to run back trajectories using Hysplit; it’ll be nice to have something else to play with besides Igor.
Right now I’m attempting to write a procedure (through many basic tutorials plus trial and error) that will take the average of my data in minute chunks. It’s very complicated for someone with almost no coding experience but I’ve made a lot of progress so far. I wrote my first little code today! It’s just a basic loop but I’m very proud of it! I still have some troubleshooting to do to make it work properly with my data set but I think it’s a good start.
